Amithlon Setup Guide

[SnkBitten]

Interesting....at least to me anyway

Booting in Virtualbox with varying amounts of ram configured (2048 MB, 3072 MB, 4096 MB, etc..) works as long as the following matches in your loadlin parameters:


With 256 MB GFX card - mem=752M statement.
With 128 MB GFX card - mem=880M statement
With 64 MB GFX card - mem=944 statement
"mem=xxx"is the line in the boot parameters for loadlin, GFX card ram is configured in Virtualbox

This is the highest number I could use for each case before Amithlon failed to boot.

All totaling to 1008 MB
752 + 256 = 1008
880 + 128 = 1008
994 + 64 = 1008

Working with real hardware I'm not having any luck. My goal of course is to provide greater memory to the "other" boot OS (Windows 7 or whatever) so if you needed/wanted to have another boot option besides Amithlon on the same box, it wouldn't have to be limited to 1 GB.

More testing, possibly Virtualbox uses more ram than actual hardware for the BIOS and more has to be reserved out of the system (mem= lower than what I've tested).

Oh..what started me down this path was I realized I could change the GFX card memory in Virtualbox from 128 MB to 256 MB to closer emulate my actual hardware. Amithlon failed to boot with this change until I started reducing memory allocated via the mem=xxx statement. As long as GFX ram and mem=xxx added to 1008 it would boot, regardless of how much more ram was configured for the virutal machine.

[SnkBitten]

I built a system off of the Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P board with an AMD Phenom X6 1090t cpu. Windows 7 Pro 32bit on 320 GB SATA drive with a 100 MB Fat 32 set aside to boot Amithlon. An 80 GB SATA drive installed and partitioned (drives partition table written as Amiga RDB with GParted) for Amiga OS. This is a pretty awesome motherboard....unless you are doing Amithlon. Nothing (sound/nic) on the board works and you are limited with only 2 PCI slots. Video and Sound, or Video and Networking....neither was acceptable to me. Kernel 3.10 ran great with the SATA controllers in IDE mode for both the SATA DVDRom and SATA HD's I have installed, while kernel 4 refused to see the CDRom. I swapped out the PCI 5500 for a PCI-E 5750 which worked with Kernel 4 but only in VESA modes, no acceleration.

Next up I'll be building off of the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L board with an Intel Core2Duo E8600. Recommendations for this board I found here http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost...28&postcount=7

Advantage....3 PCI slots, faster single core performance + larger CPU cache. I'd love to have the PCI-E card working as it benefits the Windows 7 side, and because I have a PCI TV card that should be compatible I'd like to try. I may look at a PCI-E to PCI adapter for one of the cards.

I'll post info on it after I swap out boards. I'll try to take notes on the setup/configuration as well as write up some P96 mode tweaking.

[SnkBitten]

Here's pretty much it for setting screen resolutions in Picasso96Mode.
Know what your monitor can do and choose the resolutions it supports.
I deleted all the settings (8 bit, 16 bit and 32 bit) for each resolution as I created them and made the 8 bit, tested, clicked "use", copied it and changed it to 16 bit, tested, clicked "use", copied it and changed it to 32 bit, tested and clicked "use" and then moved to the next resolution...looking it up at the website listed below.

Front Porch on the site is Position in Picasso96Mode
Sync Pulse on the site is Sync Size in Picasso96Mode
Pixel Frequency on the site is Clock in Picasso96Mode
Back Porch (I ignored)

Here's what worked for my monitor (HP w2207) with a native resolution of 1680x1050 and I have 8 bit, 16 bit and 32 bit modes all working.

VESA specs - http://tinyvga.com/vga-timing

Get VESA specs for resolutions


1680 x 1050 Desired Resolution (Visible area)
              Interlace/Doublescan
2256 1087   Frame size (Whole line/frame)
   0    0   Border size
 104    1   Position  (Front Porch)
 184    3   Sync Size (Sync pulse)
  *          Sync Polarity
  65   60

Screen refresh rate 60 Hz
Vertical refresh      65.22 kHz
Pixel frequency     147.14 MHz
Sync Polarity - Checked is Negative, unchecked is Positive

Tried to format it similar to Picasso96Mode with Horizontal settings in the left column and Vertical settings on the right.

[NMI]

I've recently installed a Gigabyte GA-M52L-S3P motherboard in my Amithlon system. It's only an AM2-socket motherboard, but it got 4 PCI-slots and supports Phenom II CPU's.
Combined with an overclocked Phenom II x2 550 CPU it's wicked fast.
No need for more than two cores since Amithlon only supports one core anyway and the x2 overclocks better than the x3 and x4.

The onboard sound is unsupported but even though I haven't gotten it to work yet I haven't completely given up on the network controller.

[SnkBitten]

Originally Posted by NMI

I've recently installed a Gigabyte GA-M52L-S3P motherboard in my Amithlon system. It's only an AM2-socket motherboard, but it got 4 PCI-slots and supports Phenom II CPU's.
Combined with an overclocked Phenom II x2 550 CPU it's wicked fast.
No need for more than two cores since Amithlon only supports one core anyway and the x2 overclocks better than the x3 and x4.

The onboard sound is unsupported but even though I haven't gotten it to work yet I haven't completely given up on the network controller.

Nice, with 4 PCI slots you have the ability to do it all...Video, Sound, Network and TV

I'd love to see more motherboards listed that have been successfully used. Some of these older boards aren't readily available so the more choices listed the greater chance someone can find one (ebay, craigslist, etc..).

I'm on the last board I plan to test for now (once I install it). I grabbed a few off ebay and from friends that were going to toss so will eventually list the ones I've been successful with (what worked/didn't work, how many PCI slots, fastest CPU available for it, etc..).

This is an awesome thread. I feel like this stuff all belongs on a wiki page somewhere

[prowler]

Originally Posted by SnkBitten

I'm on the last board I plan to test for now (once I install it). I grabbed a few off ebay and from friends that were going to toss so will eventually list the ones I've been successful with (what worked/didn't work, how many PCI slots, fastest CPU available for it, etc..).

Thanks for your work on this, SnkBitten.

You've brought this thread and the software back to life once more!

[SnkBitten]

Originally Posted by prowler

Thanks for your work on this, SnkBitten.

You've brought this thread and the software back to life once more!

heh...I'm very late to the party even knowing about Amithlon. I dropped out of the Amiga scene around the time it was released. I think Amithlon is one of the best things that ever hit Amiga and wish it had been developed more Cheap x86 hardware running Amiga OS faster than anything else out there.

I've bought a few motherboards and cpus as well as more than a few graphics cards to find the best. SATA, IDE, PCI, PCIe, Nvidia FX5200, FX5500, PCX5750, 100Mb and 1000Mb Nics, etc.... It's been fun and frustrating but mostly fun.

[jdog320]

Originally Posted by SnkBitten

Interesting....at least to me anyway

Booting in Virtualbox with varying amounts of ram configured (2048 MB, 3072 MB, 4096 MB, etc..)

How'd you get it to even install in vb?

[SnkBitten]

Originally Posted by jdog320

How'd you get it to even install in vb?

It wasn't that bad once I discovered you have to hit a key (I always use enter) at just the right moment or the bouncing ball will bounce forever.

A few post back you can see the basic configuration I have for VB and how I do it is the following:

I use a boot floppy image with a dos cdrom driver and xfdisk to create my partitions. I copy the required Amithlon boot files to the C: drive and then boot VB off that C: to start Amithlon

The trick for me was to find the spot where it had initialized the kernel and was ready to boot. It takes a few tries and is very frustrating and works about 95% of the time. On my i5 laptop it is after the bouncing ball has bounced off the right, bounced off the left and is just hitting the right side again...I press the ENTER key. On my i7 desktop it's after the bouncing ball bounces off the right side, bounces off the left side and gets about middle of the screen. It appears the speed of your physical PC determines when to hit the ENTER key. Trial and error because you have to "power off" the virtual system and restart it.

Create a 512M ram system for VB and try booting off your Amithlon CD. If you get the ball bouncing screen, try hitting enter at different points. When you get it right it immediately displays the "Reboot in progress. Phase 1...." text.

I have a small animated .gif of it booting on VirutalBox on my site http://amithlon.snkbitten.com/ to give you an idea of when I have to press the ENTER key (it's right before the ball stops bouncing and the text pops up).

[SnkBitten]

Swapped out motherboards. I was unable to get Kern310 to boot with SATA devices (configured as IDE). Possibly another setting on the motherboard I can check for the SATA controller (legacy IDE maybe). Kernel 4 boots but doesn't see a SATA CDrom drive so I pulled the SATA one and dropped in an IDE CDRom. I'm using the same HD's so it just booted and I went in to Amithlon (kernel 4) with no issues.
*EDIT*
New motherboard is nice. Sysinfo v4 gives a speed of 234 times an A4000/040....so that's nice (Dhrystones = 4280770)
Kernel 3.10 boots if SATA/IDE set to legacy but it doesn't see my drives (BIOS does).

I have also acquired an old Dell C610 laptop which I've installed Amithlon on. Haven't really played much with it so far....just spent a bit of time making boot CDroms (no floppy drive) to get a DOS boot partition on the HD and an Amiga virtual drive. Not the quickest thing (1 Ghz PIII) but seems to run fine so far. Kern310 in use and I just need to do some patching/driver installs as I've read the audio and lan controller work. Wanting this for more demonstration purposes than use....

[SnkBitten]

Maybe interesting, just a quick comparison of Amithon (physical - Core2Duo 4Ghz), AmithlonVB (Virtualbox on i7 4770K 3.5Ghz) and WinUAE (on i7 4770K 3.5 Ghz).

All machines running OS 3.9, 1 GB ram using Sysinfo v4 as comparison. WinUAE is doing full chipset emulation so will take a performance hit for that.

SysInfo v4 Dhrystones:
WinUAE - 1,172,355 (64x A4000)
AmithlonVB (Virutalbox) - 5,843,709 (320x A4000)
Amithlon (Core2Duo) - 4,280,770 (234x A4000)

As a comparison, the Dell C610 1.0 Ghz laptop (256 MB) runs:
687,835 (37x A4000)

I think it's one of the reasons I enjoy playing in this environment, it's wicked fast!

One of these days I will try the vbox install from scratch, step by step. Is there a decent writeup somewhere of how to get it installed and get all the features you've got working?

[SnkBitten]

Not that I've found, honestly I set it up exactly how i do it on real hardware, just using .img files instead of floppies, hard drives and CDs. Still unable to get networking functioning on Win10 for Amithlon. Also graphics are built-in or vesa, no acceleration. Sound I haven't really tried to get working but basic attempts have not been successful. However...a really fast modern hardware based system will make Amithlon fly under Virtualbox.

[SnkBitten]

The Dell C610 is a nice little Amithlon laptop. Built-in graphics at 1024x768x32bit is still nice even without being hardware accelerated. Sound I'm still tweaking but it makes noise. Poseidon works with Arakattack perfectly so USB is a go. The internal NIC works as well. So I have CD, Network, Audio, USB all working on a 14" laptop running AmigaOS 3.9. I've read that with the Prism2 drivers you can get the Wireless cards (not PCMCIA cards on Amithlon) working so I'll be trying that at some point (need one of the internal wireless cards first). Not bad for a $40 ebay purchase

Need to upgrade the ram and and go wireless now.

[SnkBitten]

Originally Posted by Amicol

It works on my system (Intel Chipset), still using it now.

I had Poseidon 3.8 installed, but it was timing out due to lack of key file. I knew Poseidon 4.4 did not require a key file, so decided to try updating my install.
I was shocked (and delighted) when it worked!

Order of installation:
1) Install Poseidon 3.8
2) Install ArakAttack
Ensure it's fully working (if necessary activate compatibility mode)
3) Install Poseidon 4.4

Hopefully it works for you too!

I wanted to confirm this worked for me as well. Tried it on the Dell Lattitude C610 and was able to mount and use a 16 GB USB key.

Installed Poseidon 3.8
Installed ArakAttack
Configured and tested successfully
Installed Poseidon 4.4

[SnkBitten]

Just for grins....this post was posted from Netsurf running on Amihlon that is running in Virtualbox on my Win7 PC. Still cannot get networking to work on my Win10 PC

[SnkBitten]

BAM! Posting from IBrowse running on Amithlon...running in Virtualbox on my Windows 10 PC!!

Figured it out playing with my Dell C610 laptop. I updated the kernel on it to Kernel4 and could no longer connect to the internet. All looked good, Genesis would launch and show the online like before but trying to visit a web page would eventually time out (couldn't resolve name). I thought that was weird because I had just made a connection and downloaded some files off aminet before I replaced the kernel and replaced the driver files (C:, S: and DEVS.

I replaced the drivers with the ones for Kernel 3.10 and powered off and on and swapped out Kernel4 for Kern310 in my "small" launch file for loadlin.exe. When booted I could connect again with no issues.

It reminded me that on my Win7 laptop I was using Kernel 310 but on my Win10 desktop I was using Kernel 4. Fired up Amithlon in Virtualbox, copied over C:,S:, and DEVS: drivers and then restarted with Kern310 in place of Kernel4. BAM...online, posting this from Amithlon/Virtualbox connection.

[arti]

Does MiamiDX work?
I replaced kernel and driver files but no luck.
I got sound working tho.

[SnkBitten]

I haven't used MiamiDX, just Genesis.

I haven't gotten sound working, though I can't say I've even installed AHI 6 yet either....I'll have to take a look. What audio setting did you use for Virtualbox (SB16, AC97 or Intel HD)?

EDIT**
Correction, I did have AHI 6 intalled, and sound is working
And to answer my own question, I'm using ICH AC97 as the setting.